Educational pathways are broken in low-income communities – students in these areas lack continuous access to learning between home and school. The result is often slow progress during the school year and chronic regressions over the summer – year after year after year. Families are treated as liabilities in the process, as well, rather than potential assets. 

Springboard Collaborative knows that there is actually promise in these pathways and, more importantly, potential in these students. They know that with the right type and level of support they can help close the students’ reading achievement gap by coaching teachers, training family members and incentivizing learning so that scholars have the requisite skills to access life opportunities. And they have the data to prove it.

Springboard launched in Oakland, California in 2015. They quickly found what GreenLight had discovered a few years before: Oakland was a community ready to dive into the challenges of early literacy. They piloted their signature summer program that summer: an intensive, five-week program that combines daily reading instruction for pre-K through 3rd graders, weekly workshops training parents to teach reading at home and an incentive structure that awards educational resources to families in proportion to student reading gains. The result was significant with major reading gains for all participating students. Springboard plans to continue growing their footprint in the Bay Area, bringing higher literacy rates to more of Oakland’s youngest.